Hi,

as I work for an employer who decided to embark on EGL/RBD as the best strategy to meet customers' requirements for the future I am asking about further development of EGL and RBD?

What are IBM's current and future plans about EGL/RBD? Will IBM continue to enhance and support EGL and RBD?

Is there any information you can share with me?

Thank you very much in advance for your answers.

Regards,

Marcel

Marcel,

RBD and EGL has and will continue to be kept current, be supported, and responsive to customer enhancement requests across the various deployment technologies and platforms.    We have continued to provide a new versions or releases (9.0, 9.1, 9.1.1) and fixpacks.  In these, we have provided new features such as Mobile support, Deferred compile support, ant task support, new widgets, and other enhancements and currency items such as Dojo level updates, COBOL V5.x, etc.  EGL is a very large product in terms of customer usage and technology so we try to provide enhancements across the board.   

Net..it is alive and well and there is no plan to change this within IBM.

My goal is to schedule a webcast later this year to provide Update on new features and a roadmap for RBD/EGL.

If you have specific questions, please ask and/or contact me directly at evansm@us.ibm.com.

Mark

Hi guys

I would also like to put my comment.

Here in Brazil we have a lot customers using legacy VisualAge and we are working them to do the upgrade to EGL.

We have 3 large companies already using EGL and we are working at this time with 2 other companies.

We still have for next year, proposals for other 3 large company.

Only believe in EGL because it is a product that has a strong DNA and fantasctic IBM Developer Team for EGL (Mark, Jeff, Dev, others).

Regards,

Hsieh

Hi Mark,

i have now a different view to RBD and EGL especially here in Germany. First i will point out that i'm absolute sure that the tool is a worldclass development tool.

But what will happen to the tool here in Germany without a sufficient number of companys and people thinking the same and using it for development? U might know the answer.

What has IBM done in Germany to support and promote the tool in the last years?  I know the answer! Nothing!

I remember the times when we started using EGL. There were people who told that u need three days education and then u can build applications

We had a 3 days education and afterwards we knew what we might can do but we were at the stage that we can't do anything.

Lots off  other people  made the same experience. And most them then tried to úse the tool and gave up cause they were not able to have a success.

We in the opposite didn't gave up. But it took us a long time and a huge effort to bring us in the Position to build professional Software.

Now we have a tool based on RDB/EGL with the RUI-Client which we call "Basic-Applikation" having Features like

 - dynamic Menu-control based on database,

-  access-control based on database,

- parametercontroled on the fly access to different databases

- and a lot of more great Features making live easier when building business-applications with RBD/EGL

We spent more then 2500 man-days for education and building the tool

Marcel should know TEO ;-))

today we see that we have an exeptional deep knowledge of RBD/EGL but there is no market for it. And we are to small to do what IBM should do/should have done.

Here i say thank you IBM and the other companies who tried to bring EGL to the german market. Thank u that the only target was to sell some licences and not to try to achieve  sustained success

I just say to all that : Thank u for nothing! -

At least - we asked people in US about EGL and wether there might be a market - U may know the answer - it is as small as in europe.

Finally let me ask : What will happen with a tool that has only a small number of users? Isn't it a strong sign that IBM gave us all when they buried the egl-open-source Project?

Regards

Thomas

Thomas,

Obviously, your company has put a lot of work and energy into the use of EGL.  I thank you for that and your support of RBD/EGL.

Worldwide RBD has several hundred customers with the majority actually being in Europe.  Most of these have major systems for their company written in EGL and it is a mission critical language to them.   For that reason, that why I said earlier that we, IBM,  are keeping IBM current, providing support, and doing customer requested RFEs.  So, it is alive and well and there is no plans to change this within IBM.

I will admit that within IBM, at this stage of its life cycle, it is not one of the products that is often seen presented in the latest sales slides.  This is true for many of IBM products as we normally direct most of our sales/marketing resources in just a few products even while we still support or improve other established products.    RBD has had new customers over the last couple of years who have started with EGL through conversions from other technologies or just to use it for new systems due to its capabilities.     This will continue and I am happy to help any business partner promote the capabilities with new clients.

Regarding the EGL open source project.   IBM chose to stop contributing to this Eclipse Project for two primary reasons.  First, we were not seeing much contribution from the community other than what IBM was doing. Next, and most important, we wanted to concentrate our resources and efforts on the customers who had purchased RBD/EGL which is what we are doing as described above.

Finally, one of my plans for webcasts is to ask Business Partners to also present to show their solutions and tools for RBD/EGL so that other customers will see what is available.   If you would like to participate, please contact me.  

I am interested in contributing and participating in this webcast. We have been developing with RBD for many years and have customers that like the results. chuckmorris@b2bmrp.com 

Hi Mark,

is there something new to the webcasts you have announced?

Kind Regards!

Marcel,

Sorry about the delays.  

I hope to have one before the end of April.   I need to work out the logistics for it and then will put out an announcement.   If there is anything you want to know specifically, feel free to contact me at evansm@us.ibm.com.

Thanks for your patience.

Mark

Hi Marcel

in addition to Marks reply I just want to add some remarks from a customer/user perspective.

My group have used the EGL/RBD product and the predecessors CSP and VAGen to build a financial ERP package since 1988 (more than 25 years).

We have developed a huge number of different applications during this time span, both online and batch type, on several target platforms - like z/OS CICS and Batch, WAS web, linux, Windows, VM, VSE.

We see the low development learning curve and the ease of deployment to different platforms by 'hiding' the platform specific techniques in the runtime environment as a major advantage in EGL/RBD.

In addition we have in the EGL/RBD product seen alot of new features in each new release and fixpack, to target todays need for multiplatform solutions.

One other important thing is that the EGL support team has always given first class, dedicated help when we have had a problem.

We have EGL/RBD as our strategic development platform, and that will stay that way - hopefully for another 25 years :-)

Hope this helps

Best regards

Morten Hansen, BMS-R Competence Centre, IBM Denmark

Hi Marcel,

We have been IBM Power customers since the dawn of IT (System 36 was our first I believe).

We have always used RPG to program all our internal database applications. It contains all our business applications.

Since a few years we have started to modernize our application, using the same database, but re-engineering all our processes and applications.

I have not yet found anything which allows us the same velocity for developing our applications. Also finding new IT-people has been a lot easier due to the easy learning curve for people with java or .net experience.

Support has been great, and I hope we can continue to use EGL to support our business applications for many years to come.

@Mark: I would be very interested in the webcast. Can I be invited when this is ready?

Kind regards,

Bram Callewaert

Mol Cy (Belgium)

Also thanks for the feedback.

@Bram_Callewaert c8e871a3-4d76-4753-b3c1-cdbbcf53831e -  I will do my best to advertise the webcast through the forum and other ways.

@Marcel-D 185ef4e2-58bb-459d-b414-d02f00ff390d - There are several ways to see what is included in a release.  See the info below.      To answer your question on widgets, yes..we will continue to add widgets especially in the mobile side...  If there is something you may want to see supported or properties on existing widgets, the best approach is an RFE as we are not "guessing" what widgets/properties folks are interested in.   All the items below were based on customer requested items.   So, if we know what is desired, we can determine what is possible and what within a future shipment from the perspective of applicability to many customers, resource capacity on our team, and technical feasibility.

Anyway, on notification of features, as a general rule, I post blog entries with the highlights of releases/fixpacks when we ship them.   For RBD 9.1.1, see the following link

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/3e2b35ae-d3b1-4008-adee-2b31d4be5c92/entry/rational_business_developer_v9_1_1_is_now_available?lang=en

We usually try to an post specific blog entries for new features.   The "deferred compile" or "deferred work feature" was covered in a blog article found at the following link:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/3e2b35ae-d3b1-4008-adee-2b31d4be5c92/entry/using_the_version_911_egl_deferred_work_feature?lang=en

Finally, in the RBD knowledge Center under Overview->Introduction to Rational Business Developer, there are sub-sections which cover "What's new in RBD Vn.n"  

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSMQ79_9.1.1/com.ibm.rational.rbd.product.doc/helpindex_rbd.html?cp=SSMQ79_9.1.1%2F1-0

Specifically on widgets, the following changes were done in the V9 timeframe:

V9.0.1

• Dojo Mobile Widget Support

V9.1

• Added DojoMobileTimePicker widget
• Added allowEmptyRows" property on DataGrid which shows/hides empty rows in a Datagrid

V9.1.1

• Updated Dojo Runtime to 1.10 (added i/os V8 support)
• Added ability to suppress change events on variable value changes within widgets
• New MVS form property to provide current state of validity

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